Facebook IPO: Buy Early And Buy As Much As You Can

The Facebook IPO promises to be insane. People will buy. Employees will go beyond paper wealth. Small, tiny public shareholders and investors will get rich. It is the American way. Pundits, critics, and analysts far smarter than me have claimed it’s a fad. Facebook is a fad.

I’m not a Facebook fan, not really, but I use it. I’m on it for business reasons mostly, but I’m on it. No matter what - it isn't a fad, at least not technically -- it's been around too long. There are times that I think a bunch of juvenile delinquents are running the show at the Big F. There are times that I wish it would simply go away. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. I also don’t think its stock price is going to soar, then plummet. As much as the social network can drive me batty with its privacy changes and apparent arrogance and indifference to customers, I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that I don’t believe they are going to fail. Not in the short term or medium term, anyway.

The “Facebook fad” proponents appear to have come out of the woodwork and want to predict the coming demise of Facebook as soon as it goes public. I almost agreed with them. One of the big reasons they cite is that the advertising platform is not as profitable as Google when it went public in 2004 (and pick any year to compare). I can’t think of anything better to say than, “so what.” Facebook and Google are frequently compared and they are often touted as arch rivals, but I really don’t get it – Microsoft and Apple have both grown, despite the rivalries. They’ve even helped each other, inadvertently and advertently (what a rarely used word). It's a big market place, in a big world, and Google certainly hasn't done an amazing job in social.

Back to the big reasons for its coming fad-ulous future: Useless ads, lack of Google-level profitability, and they don’t get mobile.

Useless ads

I use Google Gmail and I noticed a long time ago, and from time to time, that there are these gnats on the right side of the page, in the right column. Loads of them. Oh, those are ads appearing in my inbox -- very similar to what Facebook ads look like. I’ve never clicked on one, but someone must be or wouldn’t Google replace them with something else that was more useful and profitable? I think we should give Facebook some time to grow a little and grow with the social savvy of its user base.

Google Profits Compared to Facebook Profits

Yawn. I’m sorry. It doesn’t doom them to fad status because they don’t mirror precisely the Google Wave (no pun intended; I’m a huge Google fan). I think I even own a few shares, maybe 10, – yes, that’s a disclosure.

I know that’s poor English. Maybe I should have said “Facebook Can’t Has Cheezburger” instead. They acquired Instapaper; I mean Instagram. If anything was a fad, I’d lean toward the saying it was the no-revenue photo app, even though I think it’s cool. Every year, for the last 4-5 years has been the “year of mobile” and small business and big business had better jump on board yesterday. Come on. Mobile, like social, is still in its infancy. As Eric Jackson wrote this week, maybe the whole social graph thing – is still in 1.0 status. Watch your friends on Facebook in that live chat column area and see how many have mobile enabled. Of my small 450+ friends on Facebook, a fair number of them have mobile enabled even though Facebook doesn’t get it. They have time.

Some more back of the envelope commentary on next page, PLUS some gallery photos of women protesting before the IPO.